Secret Stash Volume I

Occasionally I will roll out a cool demo track, archive or other interesting tidbit from my musical past. Here’s #1 in the series.

This could have made a very cool bonus track on the Din Within CD, for sure – wish I’d thought of it at the time. It’s an early demo of the song “The Bottom/Between Two Lives” that I put together to show Josh my early concepts. Some of those concepts made it into the final song, some didn’t. And of course, this track is before Josh got all his gooey guitar goodness into the track.

The demo clip (and the “Between Two Lives” part of the song) is based on “Thru the Haze,” a song I actually wrote for a songwriting contest when I was in High School. You can read the “Din Diary” (blog) at DinWithin.com for more details on the song’s creation, but the condensed version of it is this: I radically re-arranged parts of that song, and Josh and I re-orchestrated it and combined it with a song he wrote called “The Bottom” to create the song that made it onto the album.

So, the lyrics used in this demo are the original “Thru the Haze” chorus, which we scrapped and completely re-wrote for “The Bottom/Between Two Lives.” The drums on the clip are my programmed sample drums, and the instruments and vocals are all me. The synth solo was replaced with an amazing guitar solo (by Josh) in the final song. And of course, the song’s overall layout was changed substantially, with new parts that Josh and I composed and produced together, etc.

But you can hear the beginnings of some of the textures we used, and I always find it quite interesting to compare songs with their early demos; you can hear my stamp on the song by listening to the demo, and you can hear Josh’s by comparing it to the released version.

So without further ado: the early demo (circa Feb. 2005) of “The Bottom/Between Two Lives”!

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